Nurturing Your Prospects

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Insights

If Sales is an area of your business that seems less effective than it should be, this is a good article to consider. Any sales team will be more successful if the lead nurturing process at your organization is organized and consistent. Bahar Consulting is happy to answer any questions on how to improve on your lead nurturing system.

Lead nurturing is the process of developing relationships with buyers at every stage of the sales funnel. In truth, lead nurturing should continue throughout every step of the buyer’s journey. Nurturing your prospects should focus on listening to the needs of prospects and providing the information and answers to information that will help them move forward. Here are some statistics culled from various marketing resources:

  • On average, 50% of the leads in any system are not yet ready to buy. If that’s the case, you need a way to keep them interested.
  • Almost 80% of new leads never become sales. This statistic could be discouraging, but with a consistent lead nurturing process, your sales team only talks to the 20% who DO plan on buying.
  • Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost. There are ways to nurture leads that are automatic and not expensive. By developing a system, your sales team engages with the best prospects.
  • Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads. In the process of nurturing leads, you educate. And an educated consumer often purchases more services or higher quality products.

What do you need to develop leads?

Effectively developing leads in today’s buyer-driven marketplace involves several marketing efforts: 1) Content must be relevant to the audience, 2) Multiple levels of marketing should be in place, and 3) There needs to be a process through which a contact can receive information at various stages of the buying cycle. Let’s look at these efforts in detail.

1) Content relevant to the audience

Leads nurtured with targeted content produce an increase in sales opportunities of more than 20%. When it comes to lead nurturing, focusing on specific content, designed for the prospect, can significantly improve the results of your marketing strategy. Providing targeted content is not always easy. You need to understand each of your unique buyer personas in order to provide the content they need. (Each type of prospect is another buying persona). Once the content is designed, it pays to have a marketing automation platform in place to help you identify, segment and target your unique buyer personas.

2) Multi-level marketing

Lead nurturing that works demands strategic thinking. In other words, your company has to be there when the prospect needs information. And to “be there” means that your marketing must employ multiple efforts to reach prospects. Those efforts should include a combination of marketing automation, email marketing, social media, paid retargeting (browsers get ads after they’ve visited your website), dynamic website content and direct sales outreach. Because there are so many tactics involved, to execute this properly, you really need to ensure that your sales and marketing teams are well aligned and working cohesively.

3) Process of receiving information

Effective nurturing requires multiple touches. Prospects often receive an average of 10 touches from the time they enter the sales funnel as a prospect until the time they’ve become a customer. In many cases, companies may only communicate with prospects 3-4 times, leaving sales on the table for competitive firms. Using the tools noted in the multi-level step noted above, your prospects can be touched more often, with increasingly pertinent information.

The most successful lead nurturing strategies deliver content that helps prospects progress through the buyer’s journey by addressing common questions and concerns. In addition to email tactics, consider how you can use a mix of content types like social media, blog posts, whitepapers, interactive calculators, Google ads, remarketing or even direct mail, to nurture your prospects into customers.